Bird's Eye
by Crimson Sun
Summary: Life is a game, and in order to play you've got to learn the rules. Hojo discovers that even the simple Hide and Seek he's been playing with the Ancients for decades is actually more complicated than he'd ever imagined.
1. Chapter 1

Bird's-eye

1.

When he woke up that night in the middle of July, his parents had already vanished. The mansion they used to share suddenly developed new corners he had never seen before, and the walls stretched on in all directions away from his bed. Lamps, tables, fine china, family portraits, all suddenly gained their own personality; yellow eyes and printed faces cast sinister looks across the room, in a secret conspiracy. There was no letter, no note, no message on the answering machine, but somehow, for some reason that would puzzle him even into adulthood, when he chanced to think back, Hojo knew instantly that he would never see his father or mother again.

The game then was survival. In the past twelve years of his life he had not once left the house without a servant; that day he ran dressed in the most insignificant clothes he could find and a pair of the cook's oversized sandals. He was headed towards the first safe place his young mind could imagine. The pebbled streets of Wutai were near-deserted in the fuzzy light of the overhanging lanterns, and the odd passer-by did not care to notice what appeared to be a slave-boy running past, despite the strange hour. He had thought to take only two things with him before the flight - out of habit - his glasses, and a watch, so he knew the exact time when his mansion burst into brilliant flames in the early morning - four thirty-six am. The numbers etched into his memory forever, branded by the fire which ate away every last remnant of his life.

From his position on the Dao Chao, Hojo enjoyed a birds-eye view of events immediately following the death of his household. Men in black, clearing away the ashes and rubble, men in white, calling the spirits of the departed, and men with hidden swords and alligator tears, seeking the body of the boy-child they could not find. He heard his own name in his mind in the days that followed - the lurid, enchanting voices of the men in white that defied time. A single syllable lasted for hours at a stretch, and in between the words, when the voices took breath, he first realised he was delirious with fever. It seemed inevitable that the monsters of the mountain would eventually find him - such a weak, pathetic creature, such easy prey - and on the fifth day after his escape, they did.

--

AN: Dao Chao?I can't be bothered checking...


	2. Chapter 2

2.

There was commotion above his head, somewhere in the abyss.

Where the Lost Things were.

The mansion had many nooks and crannies, where the Lost Things played Hide and Seek. Behind the precious vases and glass cases they rested, on top of bookshelves that stretched to the ceiling, beneath the expensive carpets. Life was a constant game of tag, of trying to find the Lost Things before they became lost forever, collecting dust in their hiding places. Lonely. Waiting.

At the mute dinners, listening to the hollow sounds of cutlery against plate, Hojo devised treasure maps in his head. A photographic memory was not something that came with birth, it came with _practice_. He would lay out the mansion's interior - all six bedrooms, all three living rooms, the majestic library, the bathrooms, the assistants' quarters - then concentrate. Feel the vibrations in the air, smell for the object that was out-of-place, then pinpoint with extreme accuracy.

He found a pile of letters in his mother's pillowcase. The papers were yellowish with age, and bound together with a red ribbon that looked new. His mother's bedroom was full of delicate, beautiful things, but he treasured these letters the most. The writing was in Midgarian, his mother's language, the language he had never been taught. Still, the handwriting was something he could appreciate, and being incomprehensible, the symbols carried an added air of mystery.

As a real surprise, he found his father's wedding ring - which the old man never wore - in a hollowed-out book on a shelf closest to the ceiling in the library. The heavy golden band looked, somehow, happier in its lost state, so he left it alone.

As Hojo grew older, he became bored with the Lost Things around the mansion. Having discovered the joys of reading years before other children of his age, he spent more and more time in the armchair in the library, finding out all about the world he wasn't allowed to set foot in.

Gaia, it seemed, was full of inexplicably lost objects just waiting to be found.

Lost limbs and lost faces, lost sanities and lost souls. Lost cities, lost voices, lost words.

But the thing that fascinated him the most, that took the greatest hold on his imagination, was the Lost Race. His young mind reeled at the prospect of a whole _race_ of lost people, millions and millions of sad eyes and broken smiles. Where can these people be? Was there a corner of the world big enough to hide them all? Were they lonely and collecting dust, waiting in deteriorating patience for someone to find them and lead them home?

The Ancients. He loved and obsessed over the Ancients. They were in the darkness, the abyss, with all the other lamenting Lost Things, reaching out their hands to him.

His eyeballs burned behind his eyelids. The commotion above his head had died, and a testy sort of silence settled around him.

"Hey."

The silence like the silences he learnt to block out of his consciousness in the mansion, the screaming silences that he could ignore in his constant search for the Lost Things.

"Hey kid, wake up."

But the mansion was gone now, silence, Lost Things and all. Without it, he had suddenly become a Lost Thing himself.

"Come on, you're not _that_ much of a wuss."

He opened his eyes gingerly and saw red. Something headless writhed pathetically in a corner of the cave he had hid himself in. There was a dank, metallic smell he couldn't recognise, and which made him feel like he was being turned inside-out from the stomach.

There was also a girl, sitting cross-legged beside him, cleaning a fan with her green and golden robes - robes which could have matched his mother's in beauty and exquisiteness. They were splattered with red too, as were their owner's face and arms.

_Blood_, he realised.

"Good boy." The girl folded up her fan and tucked it in a sleeve. "After we get you some medical attention, you can thank me properly for saving your ass."


End file.
